Tag Archives: Transcripts

Today I’m happy to announce the public alpha release of Apollo17.org, an interactive explorer that allows you to experience the entire Apollo 17 mission (305 hours long) in real-time. It represents the culmination of the years of mission data cleaning I have blogged about here. My goal is to create a full-featured site that will allow the public to explore and experience the Apollo 17 mission in this way.

Version 0.1 is now active which is just a proof of concept. Currently you need a fast computer and a good internet connection to run the experience. Best viewed in Google Chrome (it hasn’t been tested with any other browsers).

It has been an eventful beginning to 2015. In my previous post I went over the new mission audio released by NASA. This audio has been merged into the base project and the resulting transcript corrections have been made.

Over the years I have been creating Adobe Premiere videos that contain all mission audio and video. These have taken years to make and I intended to only use them for the purposes of correcting the transcript. However, I recently decided to render them out and upload them to YouTube. The resulting YouTube Channel contains 39 videos that are each 8 hours long. It’s pretty incredible that YouTube can house videos of such long duration. I wonder what people’s reactions will be when they stumble across an 8 hour Apollo Mission video without any context.

Much of the video is black with a simple timecode showing Mission Elapsed Time. Without reference to the overall mission or transcripts, the videos leave you a little lost.

Over the coming weeks I plan to create a proof of concept that links the corrected transcript to YouTube video playback.

Due to the hard work of Greg Wiseman of the Houston Audio Control Room at the Johnson Space Center, more Apollo 17 mission audio has been digitized and released on the Internet Archive. I’m now in the process of laying in the missing clips into the mission reconstruction project and have resumed correcting the Air-to-Ground transcripts.

I can’t tell if I’m the tortoise or the hare, but March 31st was a big day. My github logs show that I started the manual step of the transcript correction process December 1/2012, and completed it March 31/2014 (with big summer breaks in there). There are still many hours of missing audio material, but I’ve been in touch with the Johnson Space Center, Houston Audio Control Room and they’ve been very responsive and helpful. They assured me that the missing material was on their list of to-dos, and they’re aiming to start getting the missing material to me within the next few weeks. It feels good to get to the next step. I don’t need the missing material to begin post-processing of the corrected material. As new audio becomes available, it will mean more manual correction, then the re-running of the automated post-processing actions I’m about to write.

It has been far too long since my last update on this enormous project. I’ve been toiling away for the past year and am now only a few months away from the end of the current project phase (reconstructing timecode and correcting the transcript).

Last year I made quite a bit of headway in the colder months. The summer was a 3 or 4 month break (it’s nice and warm outside and I’m involved in other things).

It has been a month or so since my last report on my progress. I have been making consistent headway on correcting the transcript while reassembling the timeline in Adobe Premiere as I go. As of today I’ve corrected the transcript to 112:46:30, which is just after they landed on the Moon and got the GO to stay there.

If you take a look at my project on Github you can see my progress in detail.

I’ve spent many hours now listening in real time to the audio timeline that I have partially reconstructed in Premiere (which I described in my previous post). I’m 21 hours, 48 minutes into the mission (plus the two hours of commentary leading up to the launch). There have been some segments of missing audio and there has been one 6 hour sleep period that contained only occasional Public Affairs Office (PAO) announcements. Continue reading→

When tabling and OCRing all of the transcript pages, running python cleanup procedures and manually running search and replace rules, I had a lot of time to think about this project and where it might lead. The underlying thought that I kept coming back to is that I’m re-establishing a cohesive chain of events that occurred over a 13 day period, 40 years ago. Starting from this idea of a chain I expanded my investigation to include other media elements in addition to the transcript. I realized that I would have to reconcile all of the audio recorded, film shot, photos taken, and television broadcast during that 13 day period in order to reconstruct the chain of events.